“I feel terrible for the fact that Hillary is stuck in this thing,” Ms. Ferraro said in an interview Wednesday night. “Why put her in that position?”

Ms. Ferraro said that she was not asked by anyone in the Clinton campaign to leave the committee but that she did it on her own, sending an e-mail message to the senator’s campaign Wednesday afternoon, as the political dust-up over remarks she made last week went into its second day.

Words continued to fly back and forth as the Obama campaign called on Mrs. Clinton to repudiate the remarks, Ms. Ferraro said they had been distorted, and Mr. Obama said they were “absurd.”

“I am stepping down from your finance committee,” she wrote, “so I can speak for myself and you can continue to speak for yourself about what’s at stake in this campaign. The Obama campaign is attacking me to hurt you. I won’t let that happen.”

Speaking from her midtown Manhattan law office shortly after e-mailing the letter, Mrs. Ferraro, a former vice-presidential nominee, said in a characteristic rush of words that she stood by her remarks and repeatedly accused the Obama campaign of deliberate distortion.

“If you point to something that deals with race, you are immediately a racist?” she said over the phone. “Give me a break.”

Ms. Ferraro made the comments that touched off the latest exchange of Democratic brickbats after she gave a paid speech last week to the Torrance Cultural Center in Torrance, Calif. The Daily Breeze, a newspaper in Torrance, reported that she said: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”

Mr. Obama called the remarks “divisive.”

Mrs. Clinton, saying she did not agree with the comments, called it “regrettable that any of our supporters — on both sides because we both have this experience — say things that kind of veer off into the personal.”

Ms. Ferraro made no apologies. “Am I sorry? No, no, no,” she said. “I am sorry there are people who think I am racist.”

Photo

Geraldine A. Ferraro, shown in 2001, left the campaign.Credit
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

She accused the Obama campaign of misrepresenting her remarks to hurt Mrs. Clinton, saying: “They have played the race card time after time after time. The campaign has a goal, which is to attack Hillary. They have to find a way and they can’t do it on experience, on issues, so they look for places. They came up with this, and, well, here we go.”

She specifically accused David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, of using race as a tactical weapon and of implying that her remarks were racist.

Mr. Axelrod, responding in an e-mail message Wednesday night, said, “I never suggested that. I’ve known Gerry for a long time, and I don’t believe that. But what she said was plainly wrong and divisive.”

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Mr. Obama, at a news conference in Chicago, was asked whether he interpreted Ms. Ferraro’s remarks to be racist.

“I’m always hesitant to throw around words like ‘racist,’ ” he said. “I don’t think she intended them in that way.” He dismissed her suggestions that he or his advisers have accused Mrs. Clinton’s supporters of being racist, saying, “I would defy anybody to look through the record over the last year and a half, or the last year and couple months, and find one instance in which I have said some criticism is racially based.”

Ms. Ferraro, a former congresswoman from Queens, said that in her remarks in Torrance she was drawing a parallel between the historic nature of Mr. Obama’s campaign and her own selection as vice president on Walter F. Mondale’s ticket in 1984.

“In 1984 if my name had been Gerald Ferraro, not Geraldine, I would never have gotten nominated,” she said. “Was I qualified? Absolutely.”

The same, she said, is true of the Obama candidacy. “Why is his candidacy historic? Can you give me another reason why it is an historic campaign? Why are we afraid to say this? I am absolutely stunned by this whole thing. I’m not saying he isn’t qualified, never did I say that. He is very smart. He has experience issues, but if George Bush can learn to run the country, so can this guy.”

Ms. Ferraro, 72, said she had been the victim of a barrage of abusive e-mail and telephone calls in the last few days, organized, she suspects, by Obama operatives. Asked how she knew it was an organized effort, she said, “It was too orchestrated, bang bang bang. Where else could it come from?”

Mr. Axelrod denied the accusation.

Asked about critics who have suggested she was deliberately sending a message to white voters who oppose affirmative action, Ms. Ferraro, who said she would support Mr. Obama if he was the Democratic nominee, raised her voice.

“Please, this was a comment,” she said. “I was sending no message. What are they stupid or what?”

Candor has always been a Ferraro trademark, but on this matter she has been especially outspoken, some friends of hers have said, wondering if her sense of mortality, was at work. Ms. Ferraro has been in treatment for multiple myeloma, an incurable blood disease, since 1998. She had a ready answer: No.

“I have always been open and frank; that has nothing to do with it. And I intend to be around a long time.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Ferraro Is Unapologetic for Remarks and Ends Her Role in Clinton Campaign. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe